The heat is off and the scores are up!

Finally there’s been a drop in temperature this weekend that has allowed me a little more gaming time in the evening. As I mentioned in my last update, I was focussing on Donkey Kong Junior, and after almost losing the will to live with the game, I finally managed to better my score, albeit only by a thousand points or so. The new score is 40,300 so at least I’ve surpassed the 40k mark!

I then had a couple of quick games of Rally-X to round off my evening, and managed to improve my high score after just two attempts. Again, not a major increase but the new score is 54,960 and every little helps!

My focus for next week is Joust. So far I’ve succeeded on every game I’ve tried to increase a score on – will this one continue the trend?

Heatwave Stops Play!

There’s been very little activity on my MAME cabs over the last couple of weeks due to the heatwave we’re all experiencing. My cabs are located in our conservatory, which means it is too hot to play on them until after 9pm at the moment!

That said, I did manage to increase my Ms. Pac-Man score a little more during my week of play – the latest is 58,200.

Next on the list of games to focus on is Donkey Kong Junior. My current score stands at 39,200 and having played odd games over the last few days, I’ll be ecstatic if I ever best that score!

Pitfall and DK Jr out of the Red!

As I mentioned in my last update, I was determined to pass 35k on at least one of the games that I’ve thus far failed to do that on, and yesterday I actually managed it on two of them!

First up was Pitfall II, where I finally got past the first stage of the game and the resulting end of level bonus pushed my high score up to 38,870. As I suspected, progression in this game is simply a matter of working out how to deal with each screen, and there are a few score-increasing tips I’ll share at a later date.

The second game was Donkey Kong Jr. After several attempts where I got around 31k each time, at last I worked out the best way to pass the fourth screen and achieved a score of 39,200! The fifth screen (the second ‘chains and locks' level) unfortunately brought me crashing to an abrupt halt and I suspect it will be a while before I push that score much higher!

Week 3 Summary

Here’s the summary for the past seven days…

Last week was generally a bit of a slow one, with not a lot of progress made on many games. The main reason for this was my focus on reaching 100k on Amidar and Zoo Keeper, which was finally achieved on Saturday night.

Aside from that the only notable increases occurred on Dragon Spirit and Contra, though I’ve also managed to surpass 30k on both Donkey Kong Jr and BurgerTime, something I thought was impossible just a couple of weeks ago!





I’ve realised that since I started the challenge there are still around a dozen games from my list that I haven’t even tried to better the scores on, such as Lady Bug, Commando and Scramble. So my aim for this week is to try and improve my scores on at least a few of those.





Week 2 Summary

Time for a look at how I’ve got on over the last week...

I only managed to reach 100k on one game, Shao-lin’s Road, but last night came agonisingly close to crossing Taito’s Zoo Keeper off the list. Hopefully I can beat that score of 98,420 very soon.

There was some decent progress on other games, with more moving from red to orange status – I now have over 35k on 75% of the games. Significant increases this week include nearly 30k on Return of the Invaders and boosts of over 10k on Centipede, Donkey Kong Jr and Rally-X, not to mention the previously reported updates on Amidar and Donkey Kong.

This week’s aim is to pass the 100k mark on both Amidar and Zoo Keeper, recording a gameplay video for both, and it would be nice to push some more of those red status games into orange...

Mario Moving Higher

Further progress has been made on two Nintendo games from my list that feature early incarnations of Mario. Firstly I’ve now pushed my Donkey Kong score up to 87,300. I reached the third elevator screen for the first time and spectacularly failed to time my climb up the ladder to complete the level. More practice of that is certainly required! Secondly I’ve also made further progress on Mario Bros, pushing my score beyond 90k for the first time.

I wish I could report similar progress on the other Nintendo game, Donkey Kong Jr. Although I have increased my score beyond 27k I’m still struggling to get to grips with this game – I thought the original Donkey Kong was one of the hardest games ever made but there are so many ways to die in the sequel it’s untrue!